[wp-hackers] Advice regarding Custom Post Types and Taxonomies

[Mike Schinkel]

On Aug 9, 2012, at 5:30 PM, Otto wrote:
> If you need to define a post type for the team in order to have stuff
> about that team in the posts-table (totally understandable), then I'd
> associate the team-post to the team-taxonomy in an implicit manner,
> perhaps by sharing the postname and the term-slug. Essentially, the
> players and the team would both have the same terms in the
> team-taxonomy.

We tried maintaining taxonomy slug to post type slug synchronization for a while, in part because of strong opinions on this list that taxonomy should be used.  

What we found was that it is very difficult to keep post types slugs and taxonomy slugs in sync on actively updated sites unless the burden to maintain the synchronization is on the user, which kind of goes against the whole ease-of-use philosophy of WordPress.

We found that there are subtle difference between the management of taxonomy slugs and post type slugs so we'd have situations where for example we'd get an 'example' slug for one and an 'example-2' slug for another.  And tracking down exactly why that happened was taking a lot of time because it was very hard to duplicate. We'd think we fixed it but then periodically we'd have problems and we could never 100% figure out why.

But since we've moved to post relationships it's been completely smooth sailing.  FWIW.

-Mike
P.S. What I'd love to see is for category, post_tag and custom taxonomies to become post types. But I don't hold my breath on that one... :)